As Nick has decided to air our dispute publicly, a response is obviously in order. On many levels this makes sense, because the consequences of this disagreement effect the entire community, and because an external perspectivemight be helpful. With that, I thank you for taking the time to read aboutsomething that you shouldn't have to get involved with. I'm sorry that wehave not been able to resolve this between us.

Nick and I are equal partners in Industrial Memetics, the corporate entitythat owns MemeStreams. This is reasonable because we've both contributed approximately equal amounts of time and code to the project. However, sincethe beginning I have born almost all of the financial responsibilities associated with operating the site. The two primary servers belong to me, I pay the monthly hosting costs, I pay for most of the domain names, and I file the tax returns.

At the heart of this disagreement is the fact that I've never bothered towrite off my expenses on our corporate tax return. The reason is that in order to write them off, I'd have to account for them accurately, andtime and effort associated with doing that isn't worth the money to me.

A couple years ago Nick decided to put advertisements on MemeStreams. I was opposed to this decision from the outset for two reasons. The firstis that you can directly extrapolate the amount of money you are goingto make from the amount of traffic you get, and we were not going to makea lot of money. The second is that any money we do make must be reportedon our annual tax return, thus generating the paperwork nightmare that Ihave been trying to avoid.

Against my objections, Nick proceeded. At the time he believed, for some reason, that we were going to make more money than we were going to make.We concluded that we would not book the revenue until we actually received money from Google. In some respects it was an experiment - how much wouldthis bring in? As I predicted, it brought in next to nothing. After severalyears we have not generated enough revenue to reach the minimum amountthat prompts Google to cut you a check.

However, we have generated some revenue. Obviously, at some point, we're going to have to take receipt of it and book it. It would be my preferencethat we simply take the money, do the paperwork, and shut the ads offso that we don't have to deal with this anymore. Nick doesn't agree. Hehas recently become very concerned about dealing with this now and dealing with it in his way.

In April, he started the conversation off by proposing that we take receipt of the money from Google, and spend it as follows:

Part would go to registering the corporation in the State of Maryland (where Nick lives). Part would go to Nick's wife (who is a C... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Posted a code update tonight with the following changes:Fixed some minor bugs related to preview and searching for users on the post page.The interface for adding meme recipients to a circle after a post has been simplified in hopes that it is now easier to understand.Sorting the memebox makes more sense now. Nickname based sorts are done correctly, you can sort on read and unread messages, sort state survives deletes. You can see who a memestreams inbox message was CCed to, and you can "reply all." You now have a sent items folder in the MemeBox. All items you send privately will appear there from now on, but no effort has been made to recreate content from what you've sent in the past. I'll make a few more tweaks to this soon. I realize you'd prefer to sort it based on who messages where sent to rather than who they are from, and I realize the message you are getting when the folder is empty is confusing.

As always, let us know if you run into any problems with these updates.

I've posted two updates to the site tonight that Acidus wrote a few weeks ago. I'm sorry they didn't make it out sooner but I've been busy with the Christmas holidays and the like.

The first is an updated set of MemeStreams Bookmarklets. You do not have to upgrade to these if you don't want to, but good testers who report problems are always valuable to us. They should work a bit better than the old ones, particularly when selecting text on a page with a bunch of iframes, and we're now back to one peice of cross browser javascript code, which is nice.

The second is that if you're running IE or Safari you might notice your search bar is glowing. You can install MemeStreams as a search provider with one click now in both those browsers.

Of course, those of you who regularly search MemeStreams may have a complaint or two about the performance. We're fixing that soon. Its entirely a disk I/O problem and we'll be buying a new server with better storage performance in a few weeks. Unfortunately I am going out of the country for two weeks so I won't be able to get that done until I return, but the new machine should be online sometime in February.

Industrial Memetics has recently decided to try to clean up our image. So, in spite of the fact that we now have 5000 business cards which say "Information Warfare for the People," we want a new slogan that isn't alienating to uninitiates who don't know what an information war is and don't want to participate in one. We came up with a couple of ideas, but we'd thought we'd throw this up on the site and see if any of you have any suggestions. Here are our ideas so far. What are yours?

BTW, if you have places in your town where you could leave some of those business cards, we sure have a lot of them. Branded bottle openners too. They look nice. We need to get rid of them, and hopefully promote the site. Let us know. We'll mail 'em to ya.

Also, if you happen to know anyone who might be interested in a MemeStreams like system as an Intranet knowledge management tool, please let us know. We think we've got a pretty refined approach to sharing useful links, and we know a lot of professional teams would benefit from have a private system they could use for such a purpose. We're in search of a first customer who can help us get the feature set right for such an application.

We posted a significant update to MemeStreams today. There are two primary aspects. The first is that posting is now much more free reigned. You can reply to your own posts. You can reply multiple times. You can post the same url to your blog multiple times. If you do the later, it will not result in the repeated promotion of that url on the main page.

The other aspect is anti-spam. New user registration is now open again. New users will not show up on the main page or in the "recent posters" section of the weblogs page. They are relegated to the "new users" section of the weblogs page until one of the admins blesses them, or someone who already has a good reputation recommends a link from them. So, those of you who can, please watch the new users for interesting people who you might want to bring into the fold.

This is a big update so please, as always, let us know if anything is not working properly.

This morning saw the most substantial attack on the site by spammers in it's operating history. I am about 50% done with some changes to the site that will make it easier to use for regular users while preventing new users from getting their content on the main page. I hope to be able to post an update this weekend. Until that time, new account registration has been disabled.